Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary

We invite you to a natural spectacle to behold, is that every fall takes place in Mexico, when millions of these fish come to the forests and mountains of Michoacan, after completing a miraculous journey.

 Horseback riding on one of the monarch butterfly sanctuaries in forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico. 

 Large concentrations of these butterflies can be seen literally lining the branches. 

Monarch butterflies only live four or five weeks, but every autumn born a generation that will live more than seven months and, if that was not enough wonder, will be able to go, in about a month and a half, the near 4500 miles between his home in Rocky Mountain forests where wintering in the Mexican states of Mexico and Michoacan , to those who take an annual migration incredible adventure that still keeps many unknowns to science. It is estimated that are about Monarch 60 million which set sail south to escape the cold. Traveling incredible able to travel more than a hundred miles a day and if air currents are favorable, even more than doubled. How to get oriented to achieve the same forests invariably is one of the great mysteries, because if they did not know until 1975 or even the places where they spent the winter these exceptional orange-winged butterflies now know that their destiny is the forest pine and fir forests of the

Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico, its valleys and mountains above 3100 meters are the ideal conditions to develop, until ready to mate in spring. One of these sanctuaries, declared Natural Patrimony of Humanity by Unesco is Chincua saw in the Michoacan town of Angangueo, which since mid-November to late March is full of visitors to admire the incredible spectacle of nature. The place has become a tourist center with restaurants, craft shops and companies that organize trips on foot, by bicycle and on horseback in search of butterflies. But it is not the only one, also that of El Rosario and the Senguio in Michoacan, while in the State of Mexico you can find the sanctuary of The Grasshopper in the municipality of Donato Guerra, La Mesa , San José del Rincón and that of Piedra Herrada , San Mateo Almomoloa. Hibernation trees becomes a huge cluster of orange butterflies that bends the branches and makes the roads, sometimes miles-carpets for which it should be extremely careful not to step no copy while walking. The females that survive the winter in late March will undertake the return journey, laying down the road before dying the eggs to ensure a new generation to return to repopulate areas from which their parents left months ago. Before his departure, people close to the shrines Angangueo, Ocampo, Zitacuaro, El Rosario, San Felipe de los Alzati ...-, living in much of the tourism that comes to see this great show biological , held in February Butterfly Festival Monarch with a week of activities that revolve around this exciting natural phenomenon, but also revels in which its people decorate the streets and throw them to fire until the following year, as only Mexicans know it.